Connectors should always touch the shape boundary

[Tim Dwyer]

Currently connectors seem to be routed toward the
centres of objects, but they are cut off at the border
of the bounding box around objects. While this is a
reasonable thing to do when the shape is a rectangle,
for other shapes it tends to leave connectors hanging
in mid-air.

It seems to me that it would be fairly straightforward
computational geometry to find the outermost point of
intersection between the connector line and the shape
boundary, and draw the connector exactly to this point.

Having said that, I can imagine it might be a bit
fiddly, but it would definately make connectors look
much more professional.

[Bug Importer (bug-importer)]

I agree with that !
For example : you can't use connectors between ellipses,
it's awfull ! You must use lines, but they don't move with
the shape (like connectors) :-(

[Pedro- (pedro-)]

Originator: NO

Agree with that also. It is a real need for companies wanting to use
Inkscape as a replacement for Visio.

It would be nice to have the same possibilities as in OOo Draw:

- possibilities to add "glue point" on objects
- have different kind of connectors (direct line, bezier curves as
connectors...)

[Hystrix (hystrix-)]

This is still present in Inkscape 0.46dev+devel, built Dec 18 2007.
See attachment for example

[Doughy (doughywilson)]

This is something that definitely needs to be addressed. Inkscape has the potential to be a real player in the diagram/chart category, but unfortunately this is a major obstacle. The minute someone tries to to connect to a circle, they realize that Inkscape is not ready for serious diagram editing.

This fix would be a major improvement IMO.

[Jon A. Cruz (jon-joncruz)]

The problem here looks like a bug, however for many uses there is a different approach that can be taken to avoid seeing the bug.

Adding explicit connector points to the edges of objects would avoid this bug, and also is what end users often need to do (as opposed to connect to center).

multiple user-defined connector points
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/171027

[goto (gotolaunchpad)]

There's now some comments (and patches) regarding connector behaviour on the Inkscape Wiki:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/UsingTheConnectorTool

[Matthew Beckler (matthewbeckler)]

*disclamer: I haven't looked at the code, and have no idea what's going on under the hood*

As a short-term fix, before getting a proper object edge detection scheme or user created glue points implemented, might be to draw the connector's line all the way to the center of the object, and then you could just put the connector line on a layer below the connected object. It seems like that would take care of masking the line at the true edge of the object. If your objects are not opaque, then you'd obviously have to add a background fill.

It seems like this might be easier / quicker to add, so I might look into adding a patch for it.

[Michael Wybrow (mjwybrow)]

This has been fixed in SVN r21831. It will be in 0.47.